The One I Love stars Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss as a married couple struggling with a range of issues — from infidelity to bad communication — who take the advice of their therapist (played by Ted Danson) and head out on a mini-break away from other distractions. Their attempts to heal and reconnect are waylaid quickly, however, when the pair finds something quite unexpected in the sunny cottage adjacent to their holiday house. Without giving too much away: The One I Love isn't a thriller, and there are no actual monsters in the movie, but the unusual directions the films takes when it comes to telling a love story are mysterious and just as heart-pounding as the traditional screamer.

Duplass and Moss spoke to Cosmopolitan.com ahead of The One I Love's August 22 release (the movie is available on VOD now) about spoilers, relationships, and their favorite romantic comedies.

I've been keeping the secret of this film since I saw it in January at Sundance. Is that how you two feel? Like you've been keeping a secret for months and months?Mark Duplass: I don't. I feel like, when we first showed the movie at Sundance, we kind of thought the cat would come out of the bag, and we just assumed that it would be over. And people were oddly respectful of it, and I think that we then realized how beneficial it was to have people see the movie without knowing what it was. So we've been just kind of riding it out, and just saying, "OK, let's see how long we can make this last." Elisabeth Moss: I hate spoilers. I get really personally pissed off when people spoil things for me. I don't ever want to know what happens — I don't like watching trailers. I'll watch, like, 10 seconds of a trailer, and if I feel like it's telling me what's going to happen in the movie, I turn it off. I don't like it. I don't like seeing what's going to happen next week on my TV show. Mark: But then that begs the question, How do you get people to see [this movie] in the first place? The message has basically become like, "Look, it starts off as a romantic comedy, a bomb drops into the movie around 20 minutes in, explodes all over the place, and I'm not going to tell you anymore — you should just come see it."Elisabeth: We've become real teases, basically.

You're not supposed to actually pretend to be somebody else, because eventually that backfires.

How much time did you spend building your character's backstory?Elisabeth: In a movie like this, where you kind of just drop in and you don't have a lot of time to explain this couple, you really need to have a chemistry, and we kind of lucked out in that, in sense of we do, and we have a similar sensibility and sense of humor. We didn't have to work too hard on like, "Let's get to know each other!"Mark: "What are the things that are going to make us feel chemistry?"Elisabeth: "We should go to dinner!" That's how we met, we had already hung out … The most interesting thing was talking about the traits of men and women that men and women value in each other, and value in their partners, and what's attractive and what's not.Mark: And how wrong we were about what we think!Elisabeth: And how wrong everybody is! I learned a lot.

Did you walk away with some new relationship advice?Elisabeth: Yeah, I think that we're old enough at this point to know that you're not supposed to actually pretend to be somebody else, because eventually that backfires on you. That's kind of something that wears out by the time you hit 30. Hopefully! So it was more just sort of a psychological discussion on these things.Mark: While we don't have anything to say about relationships in this movie, it's more of an exploration and a strange way to look at how we value our relationships once the shine has come off of them. I will definitely say that it was really enlightening to be in a core creative group of people, like with me and Lizzie and Charlie [McDowell, the director] and Justin [Lader, writer] and Mel [Eslyn, producer], who are all in five sort of wildly different places in our relationships, all talking about some core ideas and issues and how basically different we valued certain things, and what was important at what time. It was kind of like you were visiting the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future in ourselves.

Do you consider the movie a romance?Elisabeth: Oh, I think it's very romantic, honestly. I think it's very real though. It's a very realistic exploration of a modern couple. For me, that was one of the things that was most interesting about doing it. My day job [playing Peggy on Mad Men] is set in the '60s and my day job is something that I will never do — I will never be a copywriter. So being able to work on something where I was actually was like, "Oh, that happened to me!" Or, "Oh, I know what that is!" And being able to bring personal experience, within the last two years of my life, to this role and this character, was really cool.

Do you guys have any romantic movies that you thought about when you were making this one?Elisabeth: Those are my favorite kinds of movies.Mark: I'm a real schmaltzer, guys. I'm like a Somewhere In Time kind of guy.Elisabeth: Oh, you're, like, dramatic. Mark: I go for the whole shebang. I'm a sucker. In fact, I will save certain movies that I feel like might be a little too overly dramatic, I'll save them for when I'm either sick or really tired and vulnerable, and I'm like, "Oh, my defenses are down, and I know I will be just less cynical, and I'll be able to love this movie." I did that for The Blind Side. "If I see this healthy, I'm going to be cynical," And I saw it with like a hundred-degree fever and I just wept. It was great.Elisabeth: It got you when you were down! The only thing that I would say of this movie, the only one I kind of think it's like is Eternal Sunshine: the idea of a relationship of a man trying to get over a woman and with this supernatural, kind of magical realism element to it, but what it's really about is a relationship. It's also got a little When Harry Met Sally in it, a little bit of classic romantic comedy in it. It's a real mash-up.Mark: It's a real mash-up, guys.